There is nothing quite like being on a beach at sunrise. The gentle sound of the waves rolling into and off the beach. The sea birds wheeling above, calling out to the others as the sun rises. As Simon and I walked along the beach towards Cape Kidnappers, we found this sea stack. What a beautiful place to watch the sunrise. That's one of the things I love about photography, how it gives you licence to enjoy the simple things both while you are there and later.

Cameras are great at capturing what is in front of them, technically the challenge is getting easier and easier. But a photo can be much more than that. I don't know if you have heard the expression, "Shoot what you feel, not just what you see", but it is great advice if you want your images to be more interesting. But I think the expression continues into the phases after you press the shutter release. "Process what you feel", bring out what you felt, the mood, the emotion, the drama. But how do you do that? Sometimes I know what I want but can't quite get there, that is when I use this method.

Anything more than 500 yds from the car just isn't photogenic. - Brett Weston

The best landscape images are not always when the sky is on fire or the peace of the blue hour leaves stills the world. If the landscape only looked great around sunrise and sunset then why can it take our breath away, just simply driving around a corner. Landscape images show us the world in all its moods and find the beauty within them.

That might seem like an exaggeration right, a bit of poetic licence to make a cool title? Maybe I meant, it was ten thousand steps, including the return trip, that would be slightly more sane wouldn't it? Nope, according to Simon's pedometer it was pretty close, it may have even been a few more who knows? So how did we wind up walking so far before sunrise, we decided to walk out to Cape Kidnappers from Clifton. According to the website, that's about eight to nine kilometers, depending on where you stop. With the tides and the time of sunrise factored in, we hoped we would have just enough time. In the end, I doubt we could have left any earlier as we had to wait every now and then to let the tide recede enough for us to continue to walk out.

With eight of the last fifteen days having highs over twenty eight degrees, the Manawatu is looking a little brown. The only respite in the heat has been the thunder storms that have ranged across the landscapes from time to time. Last Saturday, we watched as four separate waves of thunderstorms surged towards the west coast.